For the past 4 years I've been puzzling around the topic of leadership in market systems development. What does it take to translate big lofty ideas of a system approach into practice with a team running multiple parallel interventions/experiments, while facing resistance from below and above and pressures to spend money and report short-term results? After extensive research and consultation, and with great help from collaborators at the Canopy Lab, we published the MSD leadership framework last year.
We also published the second leadership brief which explore more broadly the question of what support do MSD leaders need to thrive. One of the clearest points of action was the need for a more dynamic market of coaching services for MSD TLs. We heard repeatedly that team leaders often feel 'lonely'. Tim Sparkman and I published a blog post to bring this to life, titled "Your job is f***ing hard". Existing management reporting lines focus on putting out fires and getting the budget and deliverables in line. They do not usually create the headspace or the time for deeper strategic sensemaking and problem solving.
So on the one hand, you can say there is a latent demand for leadership coaching – many TLs want it, but there are at least two problems. One, at least as of 12 months ago, there were not many visible specialized offers that spoke to the needs of TLs. Second, and more important, is that it's unclear who would pay for the coaching.
My current view, in early 2026, is that issue of latent demand (where there is a need for a service but nobody supplying it) has improved greatly, with at least 3 new explicit offers for leadership coaching for MSD team leaders / program managers:
- Springfield's new leadership coaching for development teams. This offer focuses on whole teams rather than individual leadership coaching, but is still highly relevant.
- Opportunity Unlimited/The Mazi Group Effective Management of Systems Programming. This capacity building program for future leaders combines 1-week in-person training with 12 months of coaching, taught by team leaders.
- The Canopy Lab's executive coaching offer – 2 modules per month over 9 months building on the Team Leader competency framework.
2026 will be a crucial year to see how many take up these different offers. Equally important is the 'internal market' for explicit leadership coaching, which is less visible but still important. In a learning session we hosted in Sept 2025 for interested coaches and implementing organizations, at least two large organizations (ILO and WUSC) mentioned explicit internal leadership coaching work they were doing. In both cases the coach was technically an independent consultant, but from a budgetary point of view this was an internal service offering from the 'center' of the organization to its project leaders.
The fundamental challenge
The fundamental challenge for the growth of a healthy, dynamic and competitive coaching service market is the willingness to pay for this service. Why is this so hard? Many programmes spend plenty on capacity building, sending staff to trainings or bringing external firms in to train them on the basics of MSD, or MEL, or both. Surely it should be easy to make the case for some specialized leadership coaching for the TLs – those lonely managers with the difficult job? Not so fast.
Enter the political reality of budgeting in most large INGOs. Here are a couple of evocative quotes from the September learning session that bring the issues to the fore:
"Coaching ends up either being by far the most expensive capacity building activity… or it's the cheapest STTA that project pays for… Either way, it can be difficult to make the pitch, especially when it goes beyond the client to the donor."
"It's really easy for us to push through a $100,000 TA agreement to write a series of studies for us. But $10,000 to do coaching? It's hard to push that both through the donor but also through our internal system."
What's going on here? Partly it's an issue with perception and the packaging. Depending on how the coaching service is perceived (what bucket or budget category it's being considered in), it flips between seeming cheap vs. seeming expensive (quote 1). It's common to see $50,000 - $100,000 studies in a budget because those outputs are deemed valuable – and critical to the project's success. It's a lot less common to see budget lines for tailored individual personal development, other than paying for the cost of training. So, if you want to experiment with coaching as a standalone service, what are some realistic ways to structure it?
Option 1: Embed coaching in another service offering
"We just don't have the mechanisms in place to pay for it… We've been figuring it out, building it into other agendas where you're providing some deliverables, but also doing some coaching on the side. In a sense we are sort of hiding it."
The pathway where there's been more movement already, is to offer coaching as an embedded service. This was a point made clearly in the September learning session: it's very difficult to separate coaching out as an explicit service, but much easier to connect it to training, or to market systems analysis.
"The easiest thing to do is to package it alongside support to market systems analysis, or MEL support"
So rather than pitching coaching on its own terms, it gets packaged alongside support that already has a clear home in the budget. This is probably where there's more low-hanging fruit, more in the sphere of control for implementers and consultants.
"Probably the most natural entry point is being a long-term strategic partner in a consortium—offering coaching to the core project team."
When you're scoping a study or TA agreement, you might ask: how could coaching come alongside this? How could we build in some structured reflective space for the team leader as part of the engagement? This is more feasible when the 'coach' is already part of the overall consortium. Overall, embedding appears to work, but it perpetuates the underlying problem by avoiding the difficult conversations about cost and value.
Option 2: Bundle it at the organizational level
A different approach is to keep coaching as a standalone service, but move away from transaction-by-transaction arrangements at the individual or project level. Instead, look for leverage by bundling coaching at the organizational portfolio level. This means a somewhat bigger budget, but it means individual team leaders aren't forced to independently argue for the need, find the budget, and work with small transaction sizes.
My work with WUSC on a leadership coaching pilot in 2024 is a good example of this. As part of a broader contract with the global office that included co-design a systems thinking COP and adaptive partnership clinics, I offered individual leadership coaching to six project/country directors who expressed an interest. This approach meant those team leaders could experience coaching without having to initially self-advocate or budget for it. The organization could see how coaching works with different people with different personalities in different situations. This portfolio approach lowered the risk, reducing the chance of a chemistry clash or scheduling mismatches leading to a poor first experience of coaching.
Interestingly, it also turned latent demand into real future demand for more coaching. Two out of those six countries then re-engaged me through their own budgets. In one case, we broadened coaching support from an individual team leader to the wider leadership team. This led to unlocking experimental work with the whole team alongside targeted individual coaching for others beyond the team leader. In the other case, a supportive country director who had been coached used discretionary budget to fund coaching for other team leaders within their country portfolio.
So that's an option for organizations that want to support their people: consider doing a pilot offering across a few different programmes. Pool the cost. Use it to allow people to experience coaching first. Then see what the response is and whether this in turn unlocks resources from decentralized budgets.
Another angle: Bring the donors in
At one point, the DCED's MSD Working group had a draft work plan item for analyzing and growing the market for support services for team leaders. Unfortunately, this emerged in a particularly busy year for and the concept came late in the annual planning process so it got scrapped.
The underlying point is that on the "who pays" question, donors clearly have a role to play. But most of the conversations are happening without them in the room.
Why? We wrote about this in the second MSD leadership brief. There's a bit of an 'unmentionable' smokescreen at play related to positioning an organization's capability to implement a systems approach like MSD. In the 'golden era' of regular and predictable large public tenders of MSD programmes, implementers competed based on what they said about their track record and their ability to implement MSD. In that frame, you end up positioning your team leader as a kind of unassailable demigod. The last thing you want to do is reveal any sort of weakness or room for improvement —especially if there are points in the bidding process allocated to team leader experience! That creates an incentive to downplay any developmental needs and puts a lot of pressure on the team leader once they are in the job.
In my experience donors are a lot smarter than many people give them credit for. And what we need is a bit more openness and courage on behalf of implementers to ask and budget for coaching services. In response, we also need a willingness from donors to say: "You know what, this is actually a good use of money. It supports my overall investment in this project."
A good friend and colleague received explicit mentorship from an experienced TL in their first experience at the head of a project… because the organization wanted to manage the risk. I don't believe that's the only frame, but it may be a foot in the door (or window) for some.
Fundamentally, coaching is not for remedial cases. It's not about admitting weakness, but rather recognising that all leaders need support—and proactive support is cheaper than crisis management.
For that to happen, the conversation needs to shift. Coaching is developmental and it's about learning that drives performance. It should be a normal thing, not exceptional. And yes, it's going to cost money. We're not talking about something outrageously lavish—but it might look more expensive than you can pass off quietly without any questions raised. And we don't want people flinching when they see it in a budget. We want it to be a reasonable, expected request.
So, there's a personal call to action here: future strategic conversations (including those I lead or facilitate) about this topic have got to bring the donor in. I'd love to get some comments—publicly or privately—from donors on how they view the importance of coaching, the feasibility of funding it, and any tips or tactics they've seen within their own agency for how to make this happen.
What's next?
This post offered a couple of pathways to action that can be jointly pursued by entrepreneurial coaches and consulting firms, forward-looking implementers, and—hopefully—by donors interested to come to the conversation table. I hope to return to this topic in six months or a year, after seeing how the market responds to new offers and speaking to a few donor colleagues who can weigh in.